Novel Virtual Reality System for Auditory Tasks in Head-fixed Mice
| Autor: | Sibo Gao, Matthew J. McGinley, Anton Banta, Caleb Kemere, Zakir Mridha, James B. Webb |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Visual perception Computer science Virtual Reality Context (language use) Virtual reality computer.software_genre Spatial memory Task (project management) 03 medical and health sciences Mice User-Computer Interface 030104 developmental biology 0302 clinical medicine Virtual machine Human–computer interaction Space Perception Animals Cues computer Sensory cue 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Spatial Navigation |
| Zdroj: | EMBC |
| ISSN: | 2694-0604 |
| Popis: | An emerging corpus of research seeks to use virtual realities (VRs) to understand the neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation and decision making in rodents. These studies have primarily used visual stimuli to represent the virtual world. However, auditory cues play an important role in navigation for animals, especially when the visual system cannot detect objects or predators. We have developed a virtual reality environment defined exclusively by free-field acoustic landmarks for head-fixed mice. We trained animals to run in a virtual environment with 3 acoustic landmarks. We present evidence that they can learn to navigate in our context: we observed anticipatory licking and modest anticipatory slowing preceding the reward region. Furthermore, we found that animals were highly aware of changes in landmark cues: licking behavior changed dramatically when the familiar virtual environment was switched to a novel one, and then rapidly reverted to normal when the familiar virtual environment was re-introduced, all within the same session. Finally, while animals executed the task, we performed in-vivo calcium imaging in the CA1 region of the hippocampus using a modified Miniscope.org system. Our experiments point to a future in which auditory virtual reality can be used to expand our understanding of the neural bases of audition in locomoting animals and the variety of sensory cues which anchor spatial representations in a new virtual environment. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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